This technology is intended to reduce the costs of sequencing by improving the ability to sequence through difficult templates such as G/C or A/T rich regions, direct and inverted repeats, homopolymer tracts, and di, and tri-nucleotide repeats. This will decrease finishing costs by reducing gaps. Additional improvements will enable direct sequencing of colony derived plasmids and more robust sequencing of BACs, cosmids and genomic DNA. These objectives will be attained by examining an entirely new class of DNA polymerases as improved sequencing reagents.